Bill Gates: MOOC providers should take a lesson from for-profit college sector

By Denny Carter, Managing Editor

July 16th, 2013

MOOCs have sported completion rates around 10 percent.

Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates said universities that provide massive open online courses (MOOCs) should engage in more “hand holding” with students as a way to stem the sky-high dropout rate in the online educational settings.

Gates, while answering audience questions July 15 at Microsoft Research’s Faculty Summit, suggested ways MOOCs could better serve traditional and nontraditional students, including taking a page from the often-maligned for-profit college industry.

Gates said that while MOOC providers and universities experimenting with the nascent online technology should avoid for-profit colleges’ “over-marketing and over-promising” that has been “properly admonished” in recent years, the industry is expert at providing support to its students.

“Because they are profit driven, the way they track students and see what’s going on” could be seen by MOOCs and public universities as a “best practice,” Gates said. Contacting a student after she has missed a lecture, for example, could keep her from joining the legions of students who have dropped out of MOOCs on every popular platform.

Studies over the past year have shown MOOC completion rates to hover around 10 percent.

See Page 2 for details on the for-profit college business leader experimenting with MOOCs…